Herman Melville was truly a rugged individual. Desiring financial independence at a young age, he found a job as cabin boy on a transatlantic passenger ship bound for Liverpool (Wikipedia). In Liverpool he witnessed a terrible plight which had yet to make its way to New York and America's other large port cities. His strongest feelings were about the dirt and degradation he saw there. Melville remarked on the huge numbers of beggars, mostly people turned off the land and driven into the cities looking for work.
After the voyage, he returned and found a position as a teacher in New York City. The school closed down, however, and Melville went back to the sea. In 1839 he once again sailed on the whaler Acushnet which was bound for the south Pacific via Cape Horn. Although Melville left few personal notes from his voyage, the popular novel Moby Dick is widely believed to portray the event and mood from this journey (Wikipedia).
In Typee, Melville recounts his brief desertion on the island of Typee. More novel than ethnography, the book served to blaze in American minds the idea of the "noble savage." Indeed, Melville gives a romanticized version of an experience with one beautiful native girl who wore the "garb of Eden." Sena Jeter Naslund, a modern novelist and commentator, has said that Melville was "an advocate of cultural and religious tolerance," and this theme is expounded upon in her 1999 book "Ahab's Wife" (William Morrow, publisher) in which she explores the domain of women in Moby Dick (Rothstein, 1). His next excursion was to Honolulu, where Melville gained notoriety for his vehement and outspoken opposition to Christian missionaries looking to indoctrinate the native population. These experiences he indulged also in Typee and in Omoo. To his disappointment, the sale of these books yielded meager returns.
After marrying Elizabeth Shaw, the couple purchased Arrowhead, now a historical landmark an...